The Boat

by NAM LE

  El Padre says something. His words splinter endlessly down the dark well of my thoughts. Vamonos, he is saying. Vamonos, I need something to warm my stomach.

  I look at his smiling face, the black moons of his eyes.

  Come on, he says. I have a special room for drinking. We will wait for your friend there.

  The two guards on the balcony do not move.

  We will toast your farewell, says El Padre. I hear you like to drink. He begins to walk indoors. Where will you go? Have you decided?

  I don't know, I say. Maybe Cartagena.

  Cartagena, he repeats. Then he beckons, and the two guards fall into line behind me. Cartagena, I think, where Hernando waits for me. Even now, at the last, we are connected. I can feel Claudia's teeth, her dry lips against my mouth. I rotate the grenade in my pocket – Hail Mary, I think – my palms slippery with sweat – and finally, when my thumb finds traction on the safety lever, I thread my middle finger through the pin and pull it out, hard. It falls free. El Padre looks back at me and smiles.

  So, he asks, have you ever been there?

  Gripping the lever tightly, I follow my benefactor into the house. A third guard opens a door from the main office and goes in ahead. No candlelight shines from inside. El Padre goes next and I go after him, as though deep into the throat of a cave, the two guards unfailingly behind me. The smell of Damita's perfume is strong in the darkness. Somewhere in front of me, El Padre's voice asks again about Cartagena, and this time I say, No, and as I say it, my thumb wet and unsteady on the lever, the memory returns to me, the picture as I have imagined it so many times in the past. Luis is sitting on the old colonial wall and looking out toward the ocean. As the sun rises, he says, you can see ten black lines leading into the steel gray water, each line maybe twenty meters apart, and as the water turns orange, then red, you can see that each line is made up of small black shapes and that they are moving away from the water, together, all in harmony, and then as the sun rises higher on your right you can see that each black shape is a man, there are hundreds of them, and they are hauling one enormous fishing net in from the ocean, slowly, step by step.

  Meeting Elise

  SHE'S COMING TODAY. It's 11:40 a.m. and I can feel my ass again. I get into a kneeling position in the bathtub then slowly stand up, one trembly, lard-like leg at a time. Water runs down my chest, over my creased stomach, coalesces on my creased balls. With my right hand I reach down and squeeze them, sponge-like, until what remains in my fist is a shriveled sac of skin. My ass is burning. My head was doing okay for a while there. I flick the soggy cigarette in my other hand into the bathwater, grab the tube of lidocaine and smear some of that sweet stuff onto my rosebud.

  You're a dirty old man, Olivia used to say, speaking generally, smiling that toothy, canine-sharp smile she reserved for me. It made me horny and she knew it. We used to spend half our time here, sitting in this long, deep tub, spying on the street below. She liked to watch strangers. I liked watching her. I almost demolished this apartment so we could both get our perve on. It took a binder full of expert appraisals and zoning permits before I was allowed to knock out the wall, put in a steel frame and glass-brick the whole thing back up.

  It gets me a bit loose-headed, all this reminiscing. I climb out of the bathtub and take off my sunglasses. It's not so bright outside, not today. Some days it gets so I can barely even see the street, its lines and depths – cars, buildings, people – everything looks so bleached out. But not today. I light up another cigarette, avoid the mirror, ignore a wolf whistle from outside and half lope, for the dozenth time that morning, to my computer screen. I quickly scroll down through her website bio: Elise Kozlov, cello prodigy, noted for her precocious facility of technique, her inventive fingering for passagework, her grace of phrasing, etc., etc. There's a mention of me too: Henry Luff, "well-regarded neo-figurative painter" – as well as her mother, credited as "raising" her in Russia. Selected by Elena Dernova for the St. Petersburg conservatory at age five; member of Anatoly Nikitin's celebrated Cello Ensemble at age twelve; world's youngest owner of a Guadagnini. Then there it is: the solitary statement that popped up only a few days ago: "Delighted to announce her engagement to Jason Sharps."

  I leave off, walk into my walk-in wardrobe. It hurts less when I take small, shuffling steps. Get your clothes on and get working. Olivia liked to say that too. But the thought of picking up a paintbrush right now makes me jittery. The order of the day, then:

  First, get dressed. Something swanky for the concert, a penguin suit, probably. It's Carnegie Hall. No counting on time to go home to change after our late lunch. I run my fingers along the plastic-wrapped shoulders of my tuxedo rack: full dress, half-tailcoat, black tie, white tie ... finally I pick out a classic number and truss myself up. There I am in the mirror. Craggy, sure – heavy in the lips and nose – but not altogether undistinguished.

  Just as I'm leaving I feel the compulsion-one last time-to see what she looks like. The computer blinks the photo on. Long black hair; impatient, deep-set eyes. She's mine in the strictest, most accidental sense. She's beautiful. She looks nothing like me.

  ***

  I'M TAKING MY CLOTHES OFF AGAIN. This time for my gastroenterologist, Eric Hingess, whose patient list includes the likes of Ed Koch and Art Garfunkel – and who charges accordingly. I was lucky to get this appointment just before the long weekend.

  "I may as well admit it," I tell him. "I'm nervous as hell."

  "It's a natural response." He leans back in his chair, wearing a suit that looks stitched together from carpet samples, watching me as I try to undo my bow tie. Rabbit chasing the fox. Oddly, Hingess seems more nervous than me, sniffing and jerking his eyebrows like a conductor rehearsing a piece in his head.

  "This is a big day for me."

  "Here," he says, handing me a pill and a plastic cup. After a moment he sighs: "Valium. To relax you."

  I swallow the pill. "Yeah, I'm meeting my daughter today. First time in seventeen years."

  "Goodness," he says absently. "How old is she?"

  "Eighteen."

  The metal disk of his stethoscope against my chest is as cold as an ice cube and I imagine it melting, trickling down onto my gut, Olivia's squinting eyes above it and her tongue retracing its route. I follow the lines her tongue chooses. I shiver. The doctor's saying something.

  "Your trousers too," he's saying. His eyebrows contort operat-ically. Then he sneezes. Two, three times: wet, clotty sneezes. "I'm sorry," he says. "What were you saying?"

  "Hold on," I tell him. "I thought we went through all this last time." I try to stare him down. The effort is fruitless, though, in light of my last visit: me passing him stool samples, him digging around inside my asshole with his lubed, latexed, incredibly knuckled finger. It felt like he was feeding a knotted rope into my gut.

  He's still watching me. I take off my patent leather shoes, unwrap my satin cummerbund, slide down my black pleated trousers and roll miserably onto the examination table. He doesn't even show the token modesty to look away. Instead, he starts talking. He talks about fecal occults and flexible sigmoids and adeno-something polyps and asks me if I've read the pamphlet he gave me.

  "Yeah," I lie. "But I thought I just had piles."

  "Hemorrhoids, yes. They certainly cause some blood in the stool. Today we're testing farther up."

  He stops talking to sneeze again. I turn away from him, wince as he grazes the hard lump outside my rosebud, then a sharper pain, then a real humdinger:

  Elise – my daughter, my baby girl – just a bloody, scraggly mess between my wife's harness-hung legs. Hideous under the man-made lights. Then a lump of flesh, stewing in sickness, pulling every possible contagion out of the air and into her body. The pain burns. Weeks and months she lay, first in the incubator, then the cot, under the watchful eyes of her mother. Her mother, who watched me as closely as her. Elise inherited her seriousness. Even before she could speak she'd look at me, unblinking, bringing me down to an accusa
ble level, her eyes deep with understanding. I hadn't wanted her and she knew it. My lower body floods with water. It feels warm and wrong. Something's yanked out of me and my eyes tear up.

  We're done, I realize. From the pain, my ass must look like black pudding. I start pulling up my underwear when I hear Hingess's voice, "Hold on there." I look over my shoulder. He's wheeling something toward me-a laptop-attached to about ten feet of evil-looking black rubber hosing.

  "That was just the enema," he says, "to prep you. This is the sigmoidoscope." "You're not going to-"

  "Only two feet of it."

  "I want a smoke," I say. My face is salty, sopping with sweat.

  I eye the hosing. Easily as thick as my thumb – probably thicker.

  He frowns. Then he purses his lips and says, "All right. It'll help you breathe."

  It hurts too much to sit up so, slouched on my side, I fumble in the bunched pant pockets around my ankles for a cigarette. I light it.

  "Will you mind if I ask someone to assist?"

  "What?" "A medical student. I want to demonstrate the procedure."

  And then she's there, white-smocked, clipboard in hand, hair tied back in a bun. From sideways she's hot in a birdlike way, and I wonder refiexively if the doctor here has slipped it to her. She studies me with a detachment that verges on impudence. No way she's just some schmuck med student. It's Park Avenue- someone must have called in a favor. She acts like she sees this every day: a sweat-drenched man, naked save for his white wing-tip formal shirt, blood leaking from his ass, lying in a fetal position, shakily smoking a cigarette. Her coolness feels familiar to me.

  The two of them start doctor-talking. I'm ordered to shift onto my left side. Someone lifts my right buttock, then from the locus of my rosebud the cold-hot pain flares again through the grid of my body. I can't breathe. It's okay, the doctor says. Slowly, breathe slowly through my mouth. Then he talks to Birdgirl, quick-fire, every word punctuated by a twist in my guts. The hosing goes in so deep it feels like part of it might snap off, stay trapped in there. My wobbling fingers drop the cigarette. I arch my head to look at the laptop screen, for some sign that it's worth it, that it'll be over soon, but all I see are smudges of gray and white. Large, hob-knuckled fingers pointing to them.

  Then silence. The doctor and his sidekick are studying something on the screen. They mutter, speaking in Latin and percent ages. I rest my eyes. On the website photo she's got her mother's mouth. It doesn't smile.

  "It's a big deal," Birdgirl says in a casual voice. When I turn to look I see it's Olivia; she's running her hands in small circles on her white smock, shaking her head at my thickness. "Of course it's a big deal. The Mayakovsky String Quartet. Carnegie Hall. Eighteen years old."

  "She's getting married," I say. "To her manager."

  "It's a big deal. It's serious."

  "He's English."

  "It's serious."

  I agree with her – I'm nodding full of agreement when a putrid smell jogs me awake. Old anchovies and drain-clogged vegetables. The doctor, an inch from my face. My eyes heave into focus.

  "Henry. You all right?"

  Without asking permission I pull up my crinkled pants, cram my shirt into them and haul myself upright with only a slight moan. My feet dangle, toes stretched down, trying to hook my shoes. She doesn't usually come so close, so clear. The doctor confers with Birdgirl in a low tone. Then he turns to me.

  "You have a number of adenomatous polyps in your colon."

  "It's not your fault, Doc," I joke automatically. I grope again for my shoes.

  "Most polyps are benign and the sigmoidoscope can remove them. However, the size and number of adenomatous polyps I have observed means we will have to carry out further tests."

  "It's serious," Birdgirl murmurs. The doctor glances at her and she frowns, blushing.

  At this point I catch on. They're not talking about my hemorrhoids. I zip up my pants.

  "Tests? For what?"

  He shows me pictures he's saved on the laptop. The polyps, he explains, are superfluous bits of tissue, generally shaped like mushrooms. There, he points, and there. I study the grainy images, trying, pretending to see. Then I see: the colony of little mushrooms in my colon. He's only inspected one third of it. He will perform biopsies through a colonoscope, he tells me, during a full colonie examination. He has awful breath. He will use a scythe-like wire to harvest my mushrooms, but there is a chance that malignant cells have already metastasized into my bloodstream or lymph system. I'm having trouble getting past the mushrooms. Birdgirl looks down, nods thoughtfully.

  "Give it to me straight," I say.

  Hingess is one of the most expensive gastro men in town and this is why I pay him: for his straight-shooting, no-holds-barred, expert opinion: "You will very likely develop colorectal cancer," he says, "if you haven't done so already."

  I'm a painter. A good one, by most accounts. I look for the angles, the things that lend complexion, the joke in things. My doctor's mouth smells like a fish has flipped inside and died. I'm sweating in my penguin suit, my asshole burning from all the wrong-way traffic. There's a girl in the room who I'd jump if I could stand up, but even if I did – get this – her face wouldn't budge from the same mix of tenderness and pity holding it together now.

  I'm looking, waiting, but I can't find it. It doesn't exist. There is no joke.

  ***

  IT WAS JACOB APELMAN'S DOING that I met Olivia eighteen years ago, when I was unhappily married to a terminally passive-aggressive wife, father to a chronically ailing baby daughter, and caretaker of a career that made my domestic life seem idyllic. I'd been with him a few years – he wasn't yet the hotshot he is now, of course – and maybe I wasn't his most gracious artist. In any case, when a life-study model canceled at the last minute, Apelman kept mum (he said later he was afraid I'd take it personally) and found a girl to replace her. He didn't tell me she was seventeen years old, had never modeled before, had been plucked like an apple from Washington Square.

  The girl had a boyish haircut and a botany textbook. Immediately she took charge. Without a word, she let her clothes fall to the floor and stepped out of them, as though from a pool of water. My studio – the top floor of an old box factory in Gowanus – faced westward, and as the day wrung itself into evening the sunlight streaked across the river and through my tall, rust-flecked windows, stenciling light and shadows across the room. A chintzy coral effect. The girl ignored the chair, sat on the cement, naked, on a reef of light. She sat so her knees touched, her feet splayed apart to create a triangle of dark space. I was taken aback by the perfect fluke of the composition. Then, cool as you like, she picked up her book and said: I'm ready.

  For years after that day, I'd continue to be amazed by the ability of her body to hold light. Even at the end – when she was flat and wooden under the hospice sheets. I'd watch her endlessly: following her body across each foot and nook of my studio; outside, walking through Central Park, lying down, the sun caught in her skin – or in bathtubs, watching how the water refracted the light on her face. I'd paint. It felt like cheating. Even after she moved in-after my wife and daughter left – she posed for me almost daily. Then, when she was tired of being watched, she'd lick a fingertip as though to turn a page but the finger would drop below her book and dangle over her groin. This didn't mean anything special, of course. If she smiled, though – not any old stretch but a smile broad enough to reveal her chipped canines – that was it, my cue, the first infallible move in our formula of sex. Always enough – there and then – to make me happy.

  ***

  OLD APELMAN BEAMS WHEN HE SEES ME. "The big day!" he cries out, before marching across the polished floorboards of his gallery dodging sculptures made of wire and rubber bands, to give me a hug. Apelman's a sucker for all that man-to-man contact stuff. Right now, though, I'm a convert. I can't get enough: I'm nestling my chin against his beard when he shoves me away, pats me hard on the back a couple of times and says, "You smell li
ke the main floor at Bloomingdale's."

  It's true-I smell good. Mixed with sweat, the half ounce of French cologne I splashed on this morning seems to have brought forth a chemical pungency.

  "And hey, buddy, did I see you power walking just now?"

  I realize, after a while, he's talking about my squirmy, gimpish gait. A new aerobic regime, I tell him. We joke around about black-tie marathons and cardiac arrests – who'll finish first – but my heart's not in it. My mind's jammed. I know why I'm here – I'm ripe for Apelman's pep – and honestly, I'm trying to follow him as he jabbers away, but in my head I'm still inside her matchbox apartment, sharing a bathtub so small we both sit chin to knee; I'm watching her eat, sloppily lips smeared with mango juice, sweet with the nectar of plums. I never thought it would be me: the painter who falls for his nude model. I love that, she says. What? When you look at me too long. Then she smiles. I drag her toward me, fend her off. Through it all, she loves hitting me. Her lips turn martial. Afterward we fall apart, marks on our bodies, smelling of fruit and mineral spirits, soap and charcoal. You're a dirty old man, she says, giving me her best dirty young girl look, steering my cigaretted hand to her lips. I leave, each time, with new bruises.

  No, I think to myself, no, get with it. Stay with the program.

  "How's business?" I ask.

  Apelman 's looking at me funny. I take another drag. Maybe he'd been hot for her. Maybe not. He'd never married. After a prolonged period of sulking and half-veiled threats on my part, they'd both denied it.

  "Better," Apelman says slowly, "if my biggest name would give me something to sell."

  "Freud's up to eight months now. Per painting."

  "He's a perfectionist."

  "I'm a perfectionist."